


Heathrow

by Whatho



Category: Nightingales (UK)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-31
Updated: 2010-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-10 21:13:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/104350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whatho/pseuds/Whatho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Oh come on, Ding Dong. Heathrow is the pinnacle of achievement for a security guard.' - Carter</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heathrow

If you had a top-down view you'd say he's standing on the poop deck, more or less where the captain might stand. His hands are folded loosely in the small of his back and his right knee's just breaking through the rail. The thing he has command of is a spreading patch of sunlight, and it's presently shaped very much like HMS Discovery. There's a flip-flop shod queue that's a charter to Malaga ranged all along the highest yard and the forecastle's jabbing the pharmacy's three-for-two offer in the DDT-free insect repellent. But he hasn't rightly noticed that himself. He's idly scanning the departure boards, clicking out the William Tell overture on his highly polished heels, topping up his over-brimming cup of vitamin D. Chock-full of vitamin D he is, these days. There's tonnes of windows in terminal 3, not one of them blinded, and when the sun's still fairly low like this it spills all through the concourse. It's not a benefit he'd predicted.

'What you look like,' says a fellow guard he doesn't much have eyes for, 'is one of them cocker-spaniel jobs with its head lolling out the backseat window.'

Well, he knew there'd be bookshops and a bureau de change and tartan tins of shortbread; flared uniform trousers and double-breasted polyester-cotton and the whole world dropping by to see him like he's George Mackay Brown or one of them stay-at-home wizened old sage type oddballs. He knew he'd get to sleep in the quiet and the dark and he knew the man next to him hadn't stone-cladded the inside of his house and he knew head office wouldn't send no bloody donkeys to join his blasted shift. Just hadn't banked on a building so full of light a mole like him could barely see for it. And it's night-time still in Toronto.

He unbuttons and rebuttons his double-breasted jacket. He puts a finger to his radio.

'Oi now. Not when I'm two feet away from you.'

'I wasn't going to use it,' says Carter.

'I don't want you making love to the blessed thing two foot away from me either. What is it with you and that radio anyway? And the jacket.'

Carter tips his chin and flicks from his shoulder something not visible to the human eye.

'Mine's choking me.'

Carter chuckles. The bloke winds a thread from his cuff round his fingers and looks at the new guy sideways.

'How you settling in then?'

'Oh, it's blinding,' says Carter. 'It's a dream come true. I've been waiting years for this.'

'Where were you before you come here then?'

'Nowhere much,' says Carter, not properly listening. 'Down at the bottom, you know. Isn't worth speaking of really.'

'And this is the top, is it?'

'Well, yeah,' he says. 'For a security guard it is.'

Oh, the times he spent playing this out in his head. Twice now he's come dead close. The most recent was a lucid dream he had gone seven in the evening. The lights went down, the back wall went all neon and Bell was hanging off his shoulder: that's how well he'd talked it up. The uniform and the hours and the glamour and that – trapping Bell of all people, Bell who mostly just got scared and punchy when Carter threatened to rise so far above him. And he heard a 'plane take off too, before the lights went up again. That close. I'm going to end up at Heathrow, Ding Dong. That's what he'd told him. Now the woman behind him is speaking Russian – Russian! – and, later in the day, he might get to wand her handbag. It's just blinding.

'It's Carter, isn't it?' The bloke – it might be a slightly different bloke – steps quite close to him and looks him a little to pleadingly in the eyes. 'Carter.'

'Carter,' says Carter. 'Yeah. That's right. But I don't want to dwell on the past.'

The fellow nods. 'Terence then.'

'Eh?'

'If I'm not to call you Carter.'

'Terence … Terence ain't my name though.'

'I know it isn't,' says the bloke.

Carter shrugs deep into his jacket as the shadow between the main and mizzenmasts slowly passes over. He remembers Terence. The first shot he ever had at Heathrow saw him get as far as the interview. He was passed over. For Terence. He'd come to love Terence, in a manner of speaking, but he still on the surface dared rate himself a touch beyond … and every time my friend succeeds a little piece of me dies and that. But still.

He'd learned a thing, he reckoned, since coming to Heathrow. Airport security don't actually employ gorillas.

'What was so dire about the past then, son? I rather enjoyed it myself.'

'I was ill,' says Carter, hunting down the sun again. 'For a while. I used to see stuff that wasn't there.'

'For pity's sake, lad. Don't let anyone else hear you say that kind of thing. This is an important job. There's folk relying on you these days.'

'I know. I'm top of my game now. No, no. Don't want to worry on that score.'

'Well. That's good to hear. I'll be leaving you a moment, Mr Carter. Some folk over that way need wanding. Why don't you take a look around?'

Carter nods slowly, not looking at anything.

'Hey.'

Eyebrows raised, the bloke turns back. Carter looks over each shoulder in turn. He swallows.

'Who was the last new bloke? Before me.'

The man shrugs.

'Does Terence ring a bell?'

'Just picked that off the top of me head, lad. Not sure I've ever known anyone of that name. Big place anyway. Who is he then? Terence. Friend of yours?'

Carter nods and smiles. 'Yeah. Sort of. Heard he was working here. I don't know. Must've heard wrong. You'd know him if he was.'

'Fair enough then,' says the bloke, and he moves along.

Carter watches him go, then turns to mark time round the edge of the nearest bar. He trails a finger along a spotless window-pane, leaving a long greasy line. He sees a flight from Amsterdam taxi in through the heat haze. Over by the arcade machines, he can hear someone playing ping-pong.

*

He's had a dream of a day. He's wanded people from seventeen different countries and he's announced a lot of areas to be clear over his radio. He's stroked the spines of all his favourite novels in the bookshop, he's drunk a gratis cup of tea out of one of the caffs and he's had a simply lovely conversation with a lady from Luxembourg, he thinks it was, about her luggage and that. Then he popped into the gents and shooed a lad who was messing with the soap dispensers, radioed some other poor sod to clean up the mess, saw a weird shadow in the corner and scurried back to the concourse. But other than that it was triffic. And ten minutes back he intervened in a bona fide security alert.

He's tired now. He turns to the boy.

'So where were you headed?'

'Oh … I don't actually have a ticket,' says the boy. 'I just come here to eat. You know. One night a month. It's the crowds I like.'

'People person,' sniffs Carter. 'I'm that way myself, pretty much.' He heads to the window that is, in this little holding-cell of a room, blocked with a blind. He forces himself a eye-sized gap and peers out at the early-evening full round moon. Then he lets the slats snap shut so quick they nearly flay his fingers. He never cared much for moonlight.

Carter turns and squints hard at the gawky-looking boy, who smiles benignly back. You'd not think it to look at him, but he was wrestled in here for setting on the Barcelona queue, growling like a ruddy Alsation. He was slavering when they collared him. Carter's trying to hang onto the heady surge of power he felt when first he laid hands on the boy's shoulders, but he's since turned out to be such a soft little weed. It's quite a struggle.

'Police'll be here any minute.'

The boy nods. 'That's all right,' he says. 'They'll know me when they see me. I can square it.'

'Pissed, were you? Got to say you don't much look it.'

'No, no. I just forgot to take my medication.'

'Oh,' says Carter. 'What then. Are you a bit … ?'

'Sometimes. I'm well dosed up now though. It'll be fine.'

Carter nods and perches himself on the windowsill. Tries to look a bit patrician. Scans the boy's face all over. 'Don't I know you from somewhere?' he says with a frown. 'What's your name then?'

'Are you Mr Carter?'

Carter reels back into the pane. 'Yeah,' he says. 'But how'd you…?'

'Some, er, mutual friends. Knew I was coming here tonight. Asked me to look out for you.'

'I don't know any mutual friends.'

'They said they're missing you. You broke up the team.' The boy leans forward in his seat. 'It's Swan, Mr Carter,' he says. 'My name's Swan. Don't you remember?'

Carter blinks and looks out the window. For one solid second, he'd swear the dusk had hurried halfway to dawn and the runway outside had turned into the empty ring-road. The tiles beneath his feet felt sticky and gritty from a chronic lack of giving a toss and the clock'd whirred around to half past three am. The two men bursting into the cell to take charge of the boy own faces he'd seen before and never wanted to see again.

It only lasts a second, but just to be sure, Carter spins on his heel, barges his way between the officers and bolts to the heaven that's undeniably Heathrow.

*

In the staff room, close to the end of his shift, Carter catnaps his weirdness away and semi-dreams he can hear two whispering voices.

'I've got another plan, right.'

'Well, keep it down, lad. He'll hear you.'

'It's a good one, this. This'll bring him back.'

'I thought the same about young Swan there.'

'Aye, but this is different. You remember how cut up he was when Terry….'

'But technically he followed him, didn't he, going where he's gone. He doesn't even believe anymore….'

'Well, I don't give a monkey's. We're getting him back. Kicking and screaming or whatever.'

And that doesn't wake him. What wakes him is a chesty animal grunt in his lughole and a steady waft of hot, pungent breath on his jugular. Carter sits bolt upright and opens his eyes on a grey-backed lattice of jet trails.

'Blimey,' he says. There's a setting sunbeam across his face. The bloke's there, just the one of him, and he's reeling away like he'd been leaning right over him.

'You all right, Mr Carter?'

'I'm triffic. Why?'

'You were moaning a bit. '

Carter drags a palm down his face. 'What the bloody hell d'you have for lunch?'

'Reformed ham and Branston pickle.'

'Smells like chimpanzee.'

'I wouldn't know,' says the bloke, and he flicks his watch out of his cuff. 'I don't reckon you should either. Fancy a game a draughts?'

'Don't ask me that,' says Carter. 'What's the time?'

'Ten past six. Or so.'

Carter glances again at the still-bluish sky. 'PM?' he says. The bloke opens his mouth to answer, but Carter chips in for him. 'Well, of course PM. We wouldn't be here otherwise. Draughts, did you say?'

'That's right, lad.'

'Actually….'

'Carter! Sarge! There's a gorilla in the gents!

There's a man in the doorway. He's not there long enough for Carter to get a proper glance, though the one he get's enough to put him off seeking out a second opportunity. It's actually the voice that strikes him properly in the face. Not that the words aren't the most unsettling half a dozen anyone's ever offered him. But the voice is thick and chewy and soft for the frame of the man to whom it belongs, and he oughtn't to be hearing it in this place. This place is pax.

'Come on then, Mr Carter!' says his fellow, rolling to his feet. 'That'll be a job for us.'

Carter's instinct is very much not to run in the direction indicated.

'Mr Carter?' The bloke comes right close to him and slams his hands onto the arms of Carter's chair. 'Mr Carter! Are you a touch insane, lad?'

'Am I what now?'

'There's a gorilla… you know, a bloody great monkey… in the gents.'

'So what?' says Carter, tightly. 'What's it got to do with me?'

'Every damn thing! On your feet now.'

'I ain't tackling no bloody gorillas!'

'You want to get sacked, do you?'

'It's not our job!' shouts Carter, trickling sweat. 'Rounding up stray anthropoids is not the job of a Heathrow security guard!'

'You'll do what's there to be done, lad. Or do you want someone to get hurt?'

'Why d'you think I'm not going?'

'I don't know what you think you're playing at, Mr Carter, but....'

'No,' says Carter, firmly, almost calmly. 'This doesn't happen here.'

And he mumbles this phrase to himself even as the bloke drags him to his feet and crams the pair of them into a lift that creaks and moans as it rises.

'Cold, isn't it?' says the bloke, and he rubs his chin. 'This high up.'

Carter draws his jacket close about him. The bloke answers his radio.

'Says he saw him last on the fifth floor.'

'There isn't any bleeding fifth floor,' says Carter.

The lift pings open on a grey, airless corridor, barely lit. The bloke pads out and takes a torch from under his jacket. Carter flinches away from it like it's a cutlass.

'This way, lad.'

Carter shrinks into a shadowy corner of the lift as the doors slide slowly out to trap him here alone with the shapes. He slithers bonelessly through the last few inches.

'This way, now. He can't have gone far.'

The bloke's out of sight now. Carter edges slowly along the wall. There's plaster dust on his spanking new uniform and his ear's pressed hard against a square of stippled canvas. He briefly turns his eyes to it: it's strewn with flecks of bright red poster paint, like someone's slit their wrists all down it.

'We got him, Sarge.'

'Well done, Mr Bell. Well done, there. You're not getting away this time.'

Carter's radio falls from its clip as he stumbles a couple of feet nearer the room. It lands on the boards with a dismaying sort of a tinkle, but he doesn't bend to pick it up. Instead he gulps a lungful of weirdly warm, moist, barn-like air. He doesn't dare look with all his eyes, but through the glare of a guttering streetlight, in the latticework of shadows thrown across the open doorway by the blinds, Carter thinks he sees a massive, rough-edged, kind-faced shape hunched over the card table. He crosses the threshold and turns to hang his hat on the hook, right alongside the other two.

The gorilla raises a hairy hand towards him. Fit to snap his spine in two. Beckoning, sort of.


End file.
